“The Breakfast Club meets Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the lair of an adolescent psych ward.”

My last couple of books have been an exploration of fear, managing fear, where fear comes from, how it can be healthy, and how it can be a barrier to life. With Counting Wolves, I wanted to address fear in a common and challenging form, as a psychiatric disorder.

It is now available pretty much everywhere! And it’s pretty much the best I can do, I think. I have another couple of books coming out soon, but oddly enough, I think this is the stronger work. Reviews are showing this to be the case, but I wonder whether it goes a bit deeper and less about me, more about the universality of what Milly suffers from.

I hope what makes this story relatable is that we’ve all faced crushing anxiety, perhaps not to Milly’s degree, but we’ve all faced it somewhere on the continuum between lying on the dock in the sunlight while the water laps, to heart attack zone, paralyzed and wishing nothing more than to stay in bed. I’m sure I got parts of this wrong, and I accept full responsibility for those but, for the parts I got right, I need to say thank you.

Clare Roscoe, thank you for your support and for sharing your expertise. To Andrea Stewart, in all your capacities, as subject matter expert and first reader. For story, Catherine Adams of Inkslinger Editing, you called this book an old friend, and I consider you a friend too. Thank you. To my literary agent and champion, Gina Panettieri, you push me to greater heights and show me how to get there. To Julia Craig for the best beta read ever. To Polgarus Studios my one stop production shop, but more personally to Graeme Hague for copy editing, Stephanie Parent for your kindness and attention to detail in proofing the manuscript, and to Jason Anderson for formatting. Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics turned the ebook cover into an awesome print one. Martin Stiff of Amazing15, you always manage to interpret my blatherings into the coolest covers imaginable.

I’d be very remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the deep debt owed to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm whose tales I bastardized and twisted to suit my needs to create Milly’s book of tales.

To my wife and daughters, thank you for your ever ready enthusiasm, for your love of fairy tale, you’ve built my house with the strongest mortar of all, with love and a love of words.